The present invention generally relates to systems management, and more particularly relates to the evaluation of systems management policies.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram illustrating one example of a conventional policy-based management system 100. The system 100 comprises an autonomic manager 102, a managed resource 104 and a policy editor storage 106. The autonomic manager 102 makes decisions regarding the management of the managed resource 104, in accordance with one or more condition/action specifications stored in the policy editor storage 106.
The managed resource 104 includes a set of sensors 108 by which the autonomic manager 102 obtains values from the managed resource 104 (via connection 112) and a set of effectors 110 by which the autonomic manager 102 effects actions (via connection 114) when the values cause a policy's condition(s) to evaluate to true. The autonomic manager 102 evaluates policies related to the managed resource 104 and renders a decision to the managed resource 104 that is interpreted as either: (1) data to be processed by the managed resource 104; or (2) action(s) to be taken by the managed resource 104. In some cases, the managed resource 104 can obtain a policy evaluation from the autonomic manager 102 on demand, via decision point 116 and connection 118.
Although such policy-based management systems greatly simplify the administration of information technology (IT) environments, they do require a system administrator to specify separate sets of policies for each supported domain, which greatly complicates the system administrator's job, particularly for complex systems.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for distributed policy evaluation.